Monday, December 14, 2015

Charvel DS-2 ST Clean & Set Up

We had a nice Charvel SD-2 ST come in the other day for a little check over and set up. The guitar was in a pretty good state when it arrived but still found a few things that needed doing!

So first thing's first we starting stripping it down to start the cleaning. Trying to turn the tail piece's height adjuster ended up turning the entire stud with it!

We also found that the bridge studs were oddly mismatched and found some odd discolouration on the bridge itself.

With the owner's blessing we decided to swap out the bridge with a new black coloured version and made sure everything was secure and in good working order!

After the bridge was dealt with with moved onto cleaning up the neck and frets.

This is the back of the neck as it arrived to us. It had a lot of built up grime and felt very "sticky" so we gave it a light progressive sand and then finished it with some Danish Oil.

Next up was the fretboard! The frets and fretboard were in pretty good condition but still worth giving them both a clean up and a polish to the frets.

With that done the next job was to investigate the output jack as the owner has mentioned he'd been getting some crackling and bad connections. As you can see this jack has certainly seen better days. The solder joints were weak and the overall quality of the jack itself was fairly poor. Not to mention the strange marks and tarnishing on the mounting plate. Looks almost as if the previous owner used super-glue to try and stop the nut from loosening.

We decided to swap out the jack with a higher quality replacement and fitted a new mounting plate as well.

So with all this done it was time for a big overall clean, polish and set up. Not a major job but a small service can go a long way to making a second hand instrument feel like a brand new one!

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